The Dark Assassin (38 page)

Orme looked at
Scuff and saw a wet and shivering child. "Clacton," he said sharply,
fishing in his pocket and pulling out a few pence, "go and get us all a
nice piece of cake. I'll make the tea."

Scuff took
another step inside, then inched over towards the stove.

Two hours later
Monk, Scuff, Orme, Kelly, and Jones, the men armed with pistols, descended down
the open workings and along the sodden bottom between the high walls of Blind
Man's Cutting. As it closed overhead, they lit their lanterns.

Monk glanced at
the sides of the tunnel. The old bricks were set in a close, carefully laid
curve, now stained and seeping with steady drips and slow-crawling slime. The
smell, unmistakably human waste, was thick in the nose and throat. The skitter
of rats' feet interrupted the slurp of water down the channel in the center.
Otherwise there was no sound except their own feet slipping on the wet stone.
No one spoke. Apart from the frail beam from their lanterns, the darkness was
absolute. Monk felt panic rising inside him almost uncontrollably. They were
buried alive, as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist. He could see
nothing but dark, wavering shadows and yellow light on wet walls. The smell was
suffocating.

Perhaps their
journey was no more than a mile, but it seemed endless until they met a
junction of waterways. Scuff hesitated only a moment before turning to the
right. He led the way into a narrower tunnel, where they were obliged to stoop
in order not to strike the ceiling. The gangers couldn't have been this way
recently, because the piled-up sludge beneath their feet was deep and
dangerous, catching at them, dragging at their feet, holding them back and
sucking them down.

Monk had no idea
where they were. They had turned often enough that he had lost all sense of
direction. Sounds echoed and were lost; then there was nothing but the steady
drip all around them, above, behind, and ahead. It was like endless labyrinths
through hell, filled with the odor of decay.

One of the men
let out an involuntary cry as a huge rat fell off the wall and splashed into
the water only a couple of feet from him.

Another half
mile and they emerged into a dry tunnel, where the ceiling was considerably
higher. There they met a pair of toshers, roped together for safety. They had
long poles in their hands for fishing out valuables-or gripping the sides when
caught by a sudden current after a rainstorm. They were dressed in the usual
tosher gear: high rubber boots, hat, and harness.

It was Scuff who
spoke to them, leaving the River Police in shadows with their lanterns half
concealed.

Then they moved
on again, probing the darkness with their feeble lights. The thought made
Monk's stomach churn and his throat tighten: What would happen if they dropped
the lamps? They would never get out of here. One day, in a week, or a month,
some tosher would find their bones, picked clean by rats.

The last tosher
they had questioned, half a mile back, had said there were people using this
old way to get from one part of the city to another. The man they were looking
for, whose name no one spoke, was one of them. In the subterranean world there
seemed little of either friendship or enmity; it was simply coexistence, with
rules of survival. Those who broke them died.

It seemed an age
before Scuff finally led them up a ladder. Their feet clanged on the iron
rungs. A few yards later they passed a sluice rushing so loudly they could not
hear their own voices. Above, in a dry passage leading to a blind end, a group
of men and women were sitting beside a fire, the smoke going up through a hole
a little distance away and disappearing into utter darkness.

A short
whispered conversation followed between Scuff and an old woman.

"Which way,
ma?" Scuff asked her, touching his tooth to remind her whom he was
referring to.

She shivered and
jerked her head to the left. A younger man argued with her, pointing to the right.
Finally Orme agreed to follow the youth one way with Kelly and Jones and return
if he found nothing. Monk took the other two men and went with Scuff the way
the old woman had indicated.

Half an hour
later, after more twists and climbs, they emerged into an open cutting, air
fresh and cold on their faces.

"She
lied," Scuff said bitterly. "Scared, I spect. Daft of-" He
stopped short of using the word he had been going to say. "That way."
He pointed back where they had come from. At the next branch in the tunnel they
divided again, Monk and Scuff going alone down more iron steps and deeper into
the bowels of the earth.

Monk stopped,
Scuff close beside him. Their lights showed only ten feet ahead, and then there
was impenetrable darkness. Now there was no sound at all except the steady drip
from the ceiling. Monk's anger had worn off, leaving him cold. He could not
blame the old woman. He was shivering with fear himself. Had he ever felt this
gut-churning terror before? He could not remember doing so. Surely he would
never have forgotten it. It was primeval, woven into one's existence. His skin
crawled as if there were insects on it, and he heard every sound magnified. His
imagination raced. The river could have been twenty feet away or twenty miles.
Was the assassin really somewhere ahead of them, perhaps even waiting? He heard
nothing but water, dripping, running, splashing around their feet. This part of
the old system was no longer used. The stream was shallow, fed by nothing but
rain down through the gutters, but it still smelled of stale human waste. The
gangers had not been here for a long time. The piled-up silt of excrement was
like stalagmites.

There was a
sound ahead. Monk froze. It was not the scratch of rats' feet but the heavier
noise of a boot on stone.

Monk covered his
lantern.

"It's
'im!" Scuff whispered, reaching up and gripping Monk's hand.

The noise of
footsteps came again. Then a light reflected yellow on the ancient, slimy stone
of the tunnel. A shadow grew larger, moving, swelling.

Scuff was
holding Monk's hand so tightly his ragged nails bit into Monk's flesh, and it
was all Monk could do not to cry out. He pulled Scuff closer, half shielding
the boy behind him. His heart was pounding in his chest, choking him. Had he
been aboveground when he was facing the man, however dark the night, he would
have been calm apart from heightened senses. He was glad he had a gun, although
this was like meeting the devil in his own territory, alien and dreadful, an
inhuman evil.

The sound of a
boot scraping on stone suddenly vanished as the man coming towards them trod in
a drift of silt. There was nothing but the swelling shadow and the dripping of
water.

Scuffs breath
hissed in through his teeth, and he clung to Monk.

The man came
around the corner only twenty feet ahead of them. He had gone another five or
six feet before he realized that the shadows of Monk and Scuff by the wall were
human and not detritus heaped against the stone. He froze, his lamp unwavering
in his hand, the yellow glare of it lighting his face like a lined yellow mask.
He was thin, his hair unkempt and ragged to his shoulders. The black slashes of
his brows cut across his face. He had a long, narrow-bridged nose, flared
nostrils, a lantern jaw, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. Surprisingly, there was
intelligence in the eyes, even humor.

Very slowly he
smiled, and Monk saw the sharp, oversized eyeteeth, the left bigger than the
right. Monk froze, the picture indelible in his mind.

Then the man
turned and with astounding swiftness loped away.

Monk galvanized
into action. He tore the cover off the lantern and, still grasping Scuff by the
hand, floundered through the silt and water and up into the drier streambed
after the man. Scuff was now easily keeping up with him, so he let go of the
boy's hand. The man ahead was forced to keep his lantern high as he splashed,
slipping, his huge shadow on the walls and ceiling like the image of a wounded
bird trying to fly, arms wide. The yellow light jerked over the black, shining
ooze on the walls and the slick surface of the stream.

There was a
turn, and then utter darkness. Scuff was so close to Monk he pressed against
him.

Monk realized
how wet he was. His legs were frozen, but his body was sweating. He could feel
the perspiration run down his back and his chest.

There was a
noise ahead, a splash. He jerked around to face it. The right tunnel.

"Rats!"
Scuff whispered hoarsely. " 'E's jiggered up 'em rats. C'mon!" And
without waiting to make sure, he plunged through the water.

Monk drew in his
breath to cry out "Stop!" but bit it back. Sound echoed down here. He
had no idea how far ahead the assassin was, perhaps only a few yards. He ran,
slipping and struggling after Scuff. The dim reflection on the water made
Scuffs small figure oddly elongated as it moved with a jerky, swaying gait.

The light ahead
was there again, bright and unguarded. Monk saw the assassin turn to face them,
his arm lifted. There was a sharp crack, a spurt of flame. Scuff cried out and
crumpled into the water.

Monk lunged
forward, pulling his gun out of his pocket. He fired it again and again even
after the figure had disappeared and there was no light in the suffocating
darkness except his own.

He put his gun
away and held the lantern high, staring at the stream, looking for the small
figure. Scuff would be already floating, pulled along by the current, scraped
by the sludge and filth. Monk saw him, lost him, and found him again. He bent
over awkwardly, because there was nowhere to set the lantern, and picked up the
limp body. Scuffs face was white and wet, reminding him with a lurch of pain of
Mary Havilland, but Scuff was far smaller, pinched and thin, the skin almost
blue around his eyes and mouth. Thank God he was breathing, in spite of the
blood that oozed through his clothes and stained them scarlet around his
shoulder and chest.

The assassin
must be somewhere ahead of them, but the thought of leaving Scuff and going
after him never entered Monk's head. Clumsily, because of the lantern, and
trying to carry Scuff gently with only one arm, he turned and began the long
way back. He walked in the center of the sewer floor, where he could move the
most easily. He had very little idea where he was, and his only thought was to
find the way up towards help.

He did not know
how badly Scuff was hurt, but he could not stop here to find out. There were
rats everywhere, and they would smell blood. Far worse than that, the assassin
knew he had hit Scuff. The fact that Monk had not followed him would tell him
that Scuff was not dead and that Monk was trying to get back up again, hampered
by carrying a wounded child. As soon as he was certain of that, would he double
back and try to finish Monk off? If the positions were reversed, Monk would!

He was lost.
There was a fork again: three ways, two ahead, one behind him. Which way had he
come? Think! Scuffs life depended on it! The water was flowing around his feet
quite rapidly. It must have kept raining all day. What happened if it got
harder, heavier? Flash floods, of course! Deep water. Enough to pull him off
his feet, maybe even drown him and Scuff. Was it still raining? He could feel
the panic rising inside him. He commanded himself to stop behaving like a fool,
and think.

Water flows
downwards. On the way in, had he been going with the flow or against it? With
it, of course. Down, all the time, down. So he had to go back against it now,
upwards. It didn't matter anymore where he emerged, as long as it was into the
air and he could get help. Any opening would do.

He started
forward again. Scuff was growing heavy held on one arm, but he had to hold the
lantern high in order to see. Its weight was pulling on the wound from the
fight on Jacob's Island. One good thing: If he was simply going up, and not
necessarily retracing the way he had come, then there was no trail for the
assassin to follow.

As Monk trudged
upwards, his mind was working. Why had the killer never gone back to Sixsmith
for the second half of his payment, nor apparently to Argyll, either? Perhaps
he had never expected to collect the second half; he might have asked for what
he meant to have in the first payment. Maybe he feared that Argyll meant to
kill him, tidy up the ends. Was he right?

Rathbone would
have to drop the prosecution or risk hanging Sixsmith, and Argyll would escape.
Neither Mary nor her father would ever be vindicated.

Monk shook his
head to clear it. All that mattered now was getting Scuff up to the top before
he died of shock and the cold. He wanted to look at the wound, but there was
nowhere to lay Scuff down, nowhere to hang the lantern so he could see. His
legs were freezing and clumsy, his heart was pounding, and the stench of sewage
all but made him gag, but he was moving as fast as he could, always uphill, against
the flow of the water. Once he passed a series of iron rungs in the wall; alone
he would have climbed, but not with Scuff.

He rounded a
corner. The light seemed clearer now. He must be nearing the surface!

Then he saw a
figure ahead of him, a man, thin, with his arm raised. There was a shout, but
in the tunnel it echoed. Against the roar of the water going over the weir he
could not make out the words. It must be raining harder.